Success!!!

While we were crossing our fingers for Sunday, Monday(today) actually turned out to be the real gem.  Today was my first flight as mission scientist so of course I get to take all of the credit for the great conditions.  The trade winds were about 8 m/s at low levels and directly from the east.  There were even scattered trade wind cumuli advecting toward the island, some of which were precipitating making today the perfect DOMEX day.  We flew the regular flight track pattern but dropped off leg 6 cross island to add another convective racetrack.  We penetrated quite a few legs on both the upwind and lee side of Dominica, encountering up to about 7 m/s updrafts.  It was a bumpy ride but hopefully it will get worse.  I got a little bit out of control with the picture taking and took over 600 photos!  Dan gave me the idea of doing a sort of time lapse in-flight photo where you see the cloud approaching and then penetrate it so I gave that a try a few times.  Really cool.  I'll include a sampling of some of the photos I took.  Note how much nicer they are when they're not out of a polarized window!

A precipitating cumuli upstream of Dominica.

Rain splattering across the windshield.

The well developed cloud deck over Dominica.

When we're really busy I haven't been great about updating every day.  I've been trying for at least every other day but sometimes that doesn't even happen.  So as for the longer term updates, Dan left us last Thursday, while Neil joined us on Friday.  Saturday wasn't an official down day, but we didn't fly because the winds were still variable.  We had the Wyoming crew over for dinner again on Saturday night and had a nice time eating and chatting with them.  It wasn't as animated of a gathering as the first Wyoming dinner, but still quite fun.  Sunday morning brought the more torrential rains I've seen in my entire life and I am not exaggerating.  Not only was it raining really really hard, but it continued for over an hour!  I'll include a photo out the back for reference.  Normally we can see way past the airport runway but during the rain we couldn't even see across the street.  We flew later that day but surprisingly enough there wasn't much going on.  Before takeoff it looked like it would be a pretty good orographically triggered day but it turned out to be quite dry.  The rain that was there that morning passed on quickly  We barely penetrated any clouds during the entire flight and it was overall a pretty boring research flight even though the winds were much better.

Torrential rains with decreased visibility.

We're planning on flying again tomorrow.  The forecast shows the winds getting increasingly strong and turning slightly northerly to be in the perfect 80 degree direction.  One of the models even showed 25 knots (12 m/s) for tomorrow and the next day!  However, along with the strong winds will come a fair bit of mid-level moisture.  It seems that our trade wind inversion might weaken and deeper convection may dominate.  To get ahead of this incoming moisture we schedule tomorrow's flight to be an 8:30 takeoff.  As Ron put it, "it'll either be a complete success or a complete failure."  Normally we check the visible satellite image, the radar, the wind speed and direction, the sounding and the netcams before making a decision about whether or not we'll fly.  However, because of the early nature of tomorrow's flight, it is already a go, and the time is fixed.  Last time MeteoFrance forcasted a deep convective day, it turned out to be a day like any other.  We'll see if they get it right this time.

So as it stands now, we're in a much better position than we were even yesterday!  We finally met a project objective and it is looking good for the long term forecast.  It will likely be a very busy next couple of days.